Monthly Archives: March 2008

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It’s been slow fishing since you’re not allowed to fish in “approved trout waters” until the opening day of trout. This is sort of silly since all waterways are connected, so the law is enforced as catch-and-release.

The pitfall of the fish and game calculator is that it doesn’t take the weather into account. Deer generally try to feed before storms, so that they can bed down somewhere if need be. Fish seem to be the opposite, any change in weather beds them down until the storm is over and they can eat everything washed into the water. Since we’ve had rain here intermittently, my guess is that the fish are going to be starving this weekend and it’ll be fun.

Now, I had mentioned before I was going to try spiderwire stealth. It works on the new rod, the cherrywood with a shimano reel, but it’s still hard to cast and requires a fair amount of whipping to get things going. However, it does work, but it seems like it really is particular about what reel you put it on. On the large medium tackle rod with the middling quality eagle claw reel, I found my old 1000 yard roll of stren and went back to that. The nice thing about the “traditional” fishing line is that it works on just about anything including the really bad casting reels. I’ve done three rods for people with the stuff and had no complaints beyond the occasional mess from backlash knots or people not realizing that 10lbs test means 10lbs.

The best thing about this rod is that it’s the lightest rod out there in it’s class. The other nice thing is that the handle is designed for one-handed fishing. You don’t feel awkward casting with one hand and carrying your box of fish toys with the other hand during a walk. On the downside, the eyelets are small, so you need slick line (the general warning about braid not being great for casting applies here) and it also breaks easily if you haul against a rock. A reel with a drag setting is highly suggested if you hit a big one. A good pairing would be a Shimano 2000 series spinning reel with this rod.

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I was asked my opinion on The Pentagon Report on Saddam’s connections (or not) with Al Quaeda. I can’t remember a document in recent history concerning the war which has been spun so severely in two separate directions. Part of the problem was someone leaked the document to the press before it was finished, and the leaked version is a draft and incomplete. It’s about a year too new. ABC News and Washington Post had “the scoop“, for whatever it was worth, and host the leaked (draft) copy. Their conclusion was a fairly predictable “Bush was wrong, this whole thing was a lie”.

Going the other direction, The Weekly Standard actually quoted significant portions of the final copy (and irked me by not linking to it) and came to the basic conclusion that there was a de facto link between Saddam and Al Quaeda by the Egyption Islamic Jihad. This, in my mind, is closest to the truth since the Egyption Islamic Jihad became part of Al Quaeda. Saddam also funded several other groups including Hamas.

The basic thorny problem remains that terrorism groups aren’t sovereign nations. Even in the case of Hamas where they took over a government, theres a lot of yahoos out there who claim to be Hamas and simply don’t answer the Command and Control structure of Hamas (if there is a thing). You run into the same problem with Al Quaeda and the EIJ and whoever else you’re dealing with. Bin Laden isn’t their king, and they don’t answer to the UN or basically anyone. It’s a bunch of angry adults acting like kids and if they weren’t firing rockets randomly into Israel (and accidentally hitting Syria in the process) they would be on par with PETA. Part of the problem is our own design – the government has always fought wars against nations and the idea of having this faceless, diffuse insurgency doesn’t neatly match the model of 1945 Germany. But it also doesn’t match the model of Vietnam, where the civilians themselves were communists and working entirely against us. Sparta comes to mind for this model – there was no standing army, there were just the North Vietnamese. Even then, the Vietnamese government had a figurehead. Sparta had their king. Al Quaeda has an endless supply of angry youths and a guy holed up in a cave with spotty cellphone reception.

Really we’re past the idea that this is a bad thing, and we all understand we need to deal with it. It took five guys in an airplane to wipe two Japanese cities off the map in an atomic fireball and it took five guys in an airplane to bring down the World Trade Center. We’re in it if we want to be or not, it’s just the march of technology. Going back to the question – Was Saddam linked to terrorism? – if you look at examples in history, I would say that he was and it was just as important to go after him as it would be to go after Ahminajad in Iran and Bin Laden. New rulers may step up but if you can disorganize things enough, you destroy the organization they have built. Could the crew of the Enola Gay have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan without a whole crew of mechanics and nuclear scientists working under them? No. Could the hijackers on September 11th have gotten where they did without an extensive network of passports and a pile of money? No. If we go after the big fish, Saddam, Bin Laden, Ahminajad and push them into hiding or at very least disrupt their channels, we can work to reduce the risk of big events like nuclear terrorism and such happening. Will there still be small stuff? Sure, but the small stuff is happening oceans away. We just need to work on keeping it oceans away rather than abandoning things wholesale.

If you’re interested in the Pentagon Report (the final version, not the ABC/WaPo draft), you can read it here.

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My desktop PC is dying, the motherboard is pretty much shot and is only reporting 1.3GB (1,323,000kb if you can believe it) of memory. Normally this screams that one of the chips is bad, but a memtest shows that all the chips are bad roughly at the same memory address. The geek talk for this is a that it’s reporting a bad address line, but the address line is the same across all three chips. This means that it’s the address line itself between the CPU and the memory, either on the bus side or the RAM side, but either way it’s bad. My father was nice and hooked me up with an AMD64 motherboard with nVidia chips on it, but this is just in time for AMD to Open Source the FGL linux driver. At this point, however, I’m pretty much sold on the nVidia chips because their support under Linux has been fairly consistent. ATI/AMD’s problem is that they sold cores and people just built whatever boards with them. nVidia was a little stricter with what you could do, so their drivers didn’t have to be incredibly diverse. The nVidia drivers in OpenSuSE just work.

In other news, I’m a bit pissed off at DVD::Rip for not shrinking DVDs. But K9 won’t do “copy protected” DVDs (basically, anything it thinks CSS is on, copyrighted or not, which includes my wedding DVD). Anyone got a decent DVD ripper and shrinker in Linux that won’t bitch?